It might be worthwhile leaning recruiting efforts more toward local Meetups than conferences.  They're much more casual/informal, provide recurring chances to meet and get to know folks, and it's common for people to pitch each other ideas and opportunities.

Some Bay Area Meetups of direct interest:

* http://www.meetup.com/Bay-Area-NLP/
* http://www.meetup.com/sf-text/ (run by a friend of mine)
* http://www.meetup.com/Elasticsearch-San-Francisco/

Some Meetups are more indirectly related, in that they attract smart/enthusiastic people who like to spend their free time learning and solving problems:

* http://www.meetup.com/sv-jug/

* http://www.meetup.com/sf-php/
* http://www.meetup.com/Bay-Area-Haskell-Users-Group/ (run by me)
* http://www.meetup.com/scala-study-group/ (run by me)
* http://www.meetup.com/jsmeetup/
* http://www.meetup.com/oakland-scala/

It goes on and on...

On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 9:58 AM, Oliver Keyes <okeyes@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Yeah. I was recently at the NYC R conference; similar problem. Don't
get me wrong, there were a lot of recruiting pitches, but the
structure of company-led conferences does not, in my (admittedly
limited) experience, lend itself to direct recruiting. It absolutely
lends itself to making contact with awesome people and chatting to
them and 6 months later finding a perfect role for them, buuuut.

On 8 May 2015 at 12:46, Nikolas Everett <neverett@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Sooooooo I went to the big Elasticsearch conference and made an effort to
> reach out for recruiting. It didn't really work out well. Maybe I'm just bad
> at it.
>
> If there is someone in SF and its not super expensive then I don't object
> but we have to think of these as opportunities to make contacts rather than
> recruiting.
>
> On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 12:40 PM, Moiz Syed <msyed@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>
>> It would be worthwhile for someone to go just for recruiting purposes
>> alone.
>>
>> On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 4:20 AM, Wes Moran <wmoran@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> May be interesting - let me know if you plan to attend
>>> https://openair2015.com
>>>
>>>
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--
Oliver Keyes
Research Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation

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